How’s It Going?

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Everyone knows golf is in a better place than before the pandemic. But just how good?

Recently, we reached out to golf businesses to find out.

In a September survey of public and private golf facilities, we saw the best self-assessments in 13 years, and a dramatic rise since 2020 in the proportion of facilities reporting to be in good or excellent financial health. (See Figure 1)

Two-thirds of public courses rated their overall financial health as 8 to 10 on a scale of 0 to 10, while private clubs posted even better scores with 80% giving themselves the same rating of 8 to 10.

In October, we switched audiences and sent a similar survey to the leadership of the NGF’s Top 100 golf businesses. These include the biggest and most influential companies across the entire industry.

When asked to consider all aspects of their company’s financial health – revenues, working capital, labor, etc. — almost 80% of the executives surveyed landed on the upper end of the spectrum. (8, 9 or 10 on a scale of 1-to-10). This compares to only 40% who cited that level of financial health prior to 2020 (and the onset of golf’s Covid-induced resurgence).

Further, three-quarters of golf leaders indicate they are optimistic or very optimistic about their company’s future outlook – a confidence level higher than that seen more broadly among CEOs in a recent Deloitte survey. More complete survey results can be found here in this related Spotlight story.

How would you rate your business’s overall financial health?

If you’d like to let us know, please take the one-question survey below and we’ll report back in a future issue of Fortnight.

Thanks for reading.